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Chess is a show I know entirely through the cast recordings; if I recall correctly, it was such a thoroughly Cold War project that the liner notes referred to the two chess players as only "the American" and "the Russian". The new book by Danny Strong turns it into a (even more) melodramatic period piece, with the chess matches not simply a allegory for political tensions or a way of obtaining minor diplomatic concessions but tools for averting World War III. The Arbiter is dragooned as a narrator, who exposits both the global situation and the personal interactions with the characters, partly through a series of very bad and very obvious jokes.

Freddie Trumper, American grandmaster and obnoxious wunderkind, is challenged by Anatoly Sergievesky, mordant, depressed, and engaged in a clandestine flirtation with Freddie's chess second and lover, Florence Vassy. Freddie is notoriously a weak point in the original book, so prone to anti-Communist slurs, misogyny, and temper tantrums it is impossible to extend him much sympathy. The new version mitigates this by giving him bipolar disorder and medical noncompliance, and also by casting Aaron Tveit. Tveit is indeed so good and so charismatic that I was on Freddie's side way more than I expected, although not enough to take self-pity anthem "Pity the Child" seriously. (The rest of the audience seemed less skeptical.) Lea Michele as Florence is just as strong vocally, and almost as strong in terms of acting, though unfortunately without much romantic chemistry with either partner. (The closest any scene comes to a sexual charge is Freddie's sleazy half-assed attempt at persuading Anatoly to throw the game in Act II.) Nicholas Christopher as Anatoly is the weak point in Act I, where I had the same opinion as I had of his Sweeney Todd: he's got the potential to be great, but he isn't quite there yet. He really needs to work on his emoting, which is too flat even for the murderous Sweeney or the dour Anatoly. He is greatly handicapped in Chess by having to affect a Russian accent, which I really hope the production drops. But! He pulled out all stops in Act II, both for the songs and the acting, and won me over with his intensity and vocal power.

So basically: the book is still flawed and they need to cut the runtime, particularly in Act I. This was the second night of previews, so there's still time for changes before the show technically "opens". If we're lucky, they'll start by cutting the topical jokes.

But the point of Chess has never been the book; it is the score full of bangers and power ballads. The music is by ABBA's Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus and the lyrics by Ulvaeus and Tim Rice. And the musical performances are GREAT. I am still guiltily fond of the kinda-no-really-very-racist "One Night in Bangkok" (which can plausibly be explained as Freddie's typical white guy take on the city BUT) and which in this production is a camp masterpiece. I am seriously tempted to see the show again just for that.

Sources: ISFDB, Wikipedia, my bookshelves

I collated this list for my Cherryh reread project. I didn't include magazine publications or omnibus editions, and only noted reprints where updated copyright dates or author's notes indicated substantial revision.

Italics = Probably not covering this in the reread.

( Cut for length )

Welcome to the Very Slow C.J Cherryh Reread! I will be rereading C.J. Cherryh's work in order of publication and posting about it on a weekly or fortnightly basis. Subsequent posts will be all spoilers all the time, but for this overview, I will stick to generalities.

Cherryh is pronounced "Cherry", because that is her name; her first editor thought people would assume Carolyn Janice Cherry was a romance writer. (Her brother, sf artist David A. Cherry, was not subject to similar strictures.) Since the mid-70s, she has written 77 novels and four short story collections (1); self-published three journal collections (blog posts); edited seven anthologies; and translated four novels from the French. Her shared world fiction, not included in the aforementioned collections, must amount to at least another four or five novels' worth of word count.

Notes towards an overview

It is so hard to know how to start talking about Cherryh's work. She is so foundational and yet so idiosyncratic and weird! She has a wide fanbase and has won three Hugos and been recognized with the Damon Knight Grand Master Award by the SFWA, and I, like many of her fans, am still convinced she is underappreciated. I blame a lot of this lack of recognition on sexism, though I think some of it is also due to the nature of her work. Cherryh belongs to what I think of, for lack of a better term, as Deep Genre: she makes almost no sense if you are not familiar with science fiction tropes and reading protocols. She is almost unimaginable as Baby's First Science Fiction, unless Baby has a heavy tolerance for getting thrown in the deep end and having to figure out oceanography and navigation pn the fly while also learning to swim by trial and error while also being shouted at by several different parties, some of whom are trying to rescue Baby and some of whom are trying to drown them, but good luck telling which is which. (This is, of course, my preferred mode of science fiction immersion, but it's impossible to say whether that is the cause of my deep love for Cherryh's writing or the result of my early exposure to it.)

Cherryh is an extremely immersive writer, and famously an expert at extremely tight unremarked third-person focalization; she expects you to pick up hints and asides and put together information by implication, or, if you can't do that, at least to be absorbed enough by what you do understand that you just keep going anyway. To this day, I have almost no comprehension of the plot of a Cherryh novel until my second or third reading.

Cherryh, more than almost any other sf writer, feels like she is writing history: her books don't cohere into a single grand narrative, but are each snapshots of different collisions between nature, nurture, chance individual encounters, and overwhelming social forces. Very frequently, conflicts are upended or balances of power shifted by the sudden intrusion of a player that was never mentioned before, or that got mentioned in a tossed-off subordinate clause in a passage focused on something else entirely, and it doesn't feel like a deus ex machina or an overcomplication; it feels like panning out of a zoomed-in map and realizing you should have been thinking about how those close-ups or insets fit into a bigger context all along.

Cherryh writes so many different kinds of books—big anthropological novels told blockbuster-style with multiple POVs, with a Victorian devotion to including people across every sector of society and class; weird slender thought experiments about the nature of reality and the definition of humanity; and alien encounters, so many alien encounters, humans encountering aliens, humans encountering humans who might as well be aliens, humans and aliens encountering other aliens who make the "alienness" possible to other humans seem facile and trite. (I am very much looking forward to getting to the weird body horror of Voyager in the Night and the multi-way alien encounter extravaganza of the Chanur books.)

I have heard Cherryh's prose style called dry; in a recent podcast Arkady Martine called it "transparent"; I remember Jo Walton once in a blog post saying it read like something translated out of an alien language. I personally love its distinctive rhythms and find it extremely chewy and dense, the very opposite of transparent; I think it gets a lot of its peculiar flavor from the deliberate deployment of archaic vocabulary—not words that have fallen out of use, but words where she relies on the older rather than the present connotations. Vocabulary and grammar become tools of estrangement; the style itself tells you that you are not reading something set in the present day and you cannot assume you understand the personal or social logic shaping this narrative by default.

Series and other groupings

I do not have a single good way to divide up Cherryh's oeuvre, so here, have a mishmash of setting, genre, and production history:

The Union-Alliance universe
Most or all of Cherryh's science fiction takes place in a vast future history known as the Union-Alliance universe for two of its major political powers. Union-Alliance is less a series than a setting; most of the books grouped under it stand alone, or belong to short subseries (often later published in combined editions) that are independent of each other. Outside the subseries, the books can be read in any order, and publication order generally does not reflect internal chronology.

In this future history, habitable planets are rare; extrasolar colonies are initially space stations built out of slower-than-light transports sent from star to star. After FTL (dependent on sketchily explained "jump points") is developed and new (though still rare) Earthlike exoplanets are settled, trade is dependent on family-owned and operated Merchanter ships, each one in effect its own independent small nation.

The books themselves vary widely in focus: some depict an enclosed society, a ship or a space station or a single, sparsely populated planet; some encompass vast spreads of space or time and major historical events. Cherryh has a welcome tendency to produce books whose characters all share a common background and then to go on to write others from the perspective of the other three or four sides of any given conflict. (Conflicts in Cherryh seldom boil down to as few as two sides.)

Although author timelines and republished edition front matter puts all the sf Cherryh produced in the twentieth century into this background, when people speak casually of the Union-Alliance books they often mean the subset of books clustered around the time period of the Company Wars, when Earth is attempting to exert control over its extrasolar colonies. (None of the books take place on Earth; only two take place in the solar system. Probably one of the clearest signs that Cherryh is American is that her sympathy defaults to the colonies attempting to break away.)

The atevi series
In the atevi series (also known as the Foreigner sequence, for the first novel in it), a lost human ship settles on a world already inhabited by an intelligent native species called atevi.

The humans and atevi get along great for around twenty years, which is when the humans find themselves in the midst of a catastrophic war they don't understand how they started. The surviving humans are displaced to a single large island, with a peace treaty that declares no humans will set foot on the mainland except the official interpreter.

The series takes place a few hundred years later and focuses on the latest official interpreter, whose job duties are soon to expand drastically and include cross-planetary adventures and fun poisoned teatimes with local grand dames.

This series has been the bulk of Cherryh's work since the mid-nineties. It is twenty-two volumes and still ongoing. Unlike the (other?) (2) Union-Alliance books, these form a single continuous narrative; by the late teens, they are more or less a roman fleuve. Cherryh initially breaks down the longer series into sets of three, possibly with the hope each new trilogy could serve as a new entrypoint, but this pattern is abandoned after the first fifteen books. She does still valiantly attempt to summarize the important points of the previous books within text, but in my opinion this straight-up does not work. You really do need to read these books in chronological order for them to make sense.

The series is popular and well-beloved and has been cited as a major influence by both Ann Leckie and Arkady Martine, and I nevertheless blame it in part for Cherryh's failure to receive the attention and respect she deserves. Long ongoing serials do not tend to receive as many award nominations or reviews as work that requires less background reading, not helped in this case by the weakness of the latest books. The atevi books have always been less dense than Cherryh's earlier work, but in the past decade they have sometimes narrowed down to an excruciating microfocus. (I am especially cranky about Book 19, which takes place over a single weekend and is entirely concerned with the logistics of securing a hotel room from infiltration or attack.)

Fantasies
Cherryh's fantasies are all traditional medievalish works, most of them very Tolkien influenced. The majority of them are in ahistorical, vaguely Celtic settings (the Ealdwood books, Faery in Shadow/Faery Moon, the Fortress series, possibly Goblin Mirror); one trilogy is set in land-of-Fable Tsarist Russia; one magicless standalone is set in a kind of China-Japan analogue that feels a lot less Orientalist than that combination should because of the determined lack of ornament and exoticization (YMMV).

Like her science fiction, Cherryh's fantasy tends to feature protagonists who are terrified, confused, paranoid, and in desperate need of a bath and a good night's sleep. Also like her science fiction, somehow or other her fantasy invariably ends up being about thought control and social conditioning and infinite regresses of self-conscious thought.

Shared-world work
The eighties saw an explosion in shared-world fantasy, something like professional fanfiction and something like the work of television writers' rooms: groups of writers would collaborate on stories set in a background they developed together. One of the earliest and most influential was the Thieves' World series edited by Robert Lynn Asprin and Lynn Abbey, set in a sword & sorcery venue most notable for its exponential urban deterioration with each volume, grimdark avant la lettre. Cherryh was a frequent contributor, her stories featuring a particular set of down-on-their-luck mercenaries, street kids gone hedge magicians, and the extremely powerful vampirelike sorceress Ischade. This series set the pattern for her most significant later shared world works, both in terms of her frequent collaboration with Abbey and writer Janet Morris and in the tendency to treat each story more as a chapter in an ongoing serial than as a complete episode in itself.

For Janet Morris' Heroes in Hell anthologies, set in a Riverworld-inspired afterworld where everybody in all of recorded history seemed to be in the underworld, Cherryh relied on her college major and Master's degree in Classics to write about Julius Caesar and associated historical figures, producing nine or ten short stories; some of the short fiction was incorporated into the two novel collaborations with Morris and Cherryh's solo Heroes in Helll novel. The world-building and general theology are frankly a mess, but I would still 100% go for a historical novel of the Roman Republic or early empire if Cherryh felt like writing one.

Cherryh launched her own shared world series, Merovingen Nights,with the solo novel, Angel with a Sword, and then edited seven subsequent anthologies. She described several of the anthologies as "mosaic novels", and they do indeed show an unusual amount of close coordination and interdependence among the stories penned by different authors. Despite the novel title, the series is science fiction, set on an isolated planet in the Union-Alliance universe. Neither novel nor anthologies were reprinted during DAW's early 2000s phase of repackaging most of the older work Cherryh originally published with them, which is a great shame; they are very solid.

Full disclosure

This isn't 100% a reread project. There are three books in the 2000s I've never read. I'll let you know when we get there.

I also expect Cherryh to have published more books by the time I finish, but let's be real, I'm going to read those as soon as they come out.

Currently I'm not planning to cover Cherryh's translations, her journals, or most of her shared world work. I'm not sure how I'll handle the Foreigner books, which suffer from diminishing returns; I may cover the first few and stop, I may skip around to only the volumes I find particularly interesting, I may bundle together multiple volumes in a single post.

I am going to cover the Lois and Clark tie-in novel, because I find it hilarious that Cherryh (a) wrote a contemporary novel; (b) wrote a tie-in novel; (c) wrote a Superman novel. (Her first short story ever, the Hugo Award winner "Cassandra", was also set in the then-present day, but I think that's it.)

Other Cherryh reading projects

The single tag for Jo Walton's Cherryh rereads has been lost to the Reactor Magazine reorganization, but you can find them pretty easily by going to the oldest Cherryh reviews on the site and reading forward

Ian Sales' SF Mistressworks project has multiple Cherryh reviews by multiple reviewers

The Three Hoarsemen podcast, The Works of C.J. Cherryh

sholio's Read All the Cherryh tag

james_davis_nicoll is reading a Cherryh a month for 2025; to find his earlier Cherryh reviews, use a keyword search

Endnotes

1 This count includes the collaborations with Janet Morris and Jane Fancher, but excludes The Sword of Knowledge series, which was written entirely by her collaborators (Leslie Fish, Nancy Asire, and Mercedes Lackey) from Cherryh's outline. [back]

2 It's not clear from the text itself whether or not these books also fall under the Union-Alliance umbrella. Cherryh has sometimes said they do, but the humans in the Foreigner series are so isolated that the events of the Union-Alliance books have effectively no bearing on them. [back]

Ghost Quartet is a band: Dave Malloy on keyboard, Brent Arnold on cello, Gelsey Bell and Brittain Ashford on various instruments, and everyone providing vocals. Ghost Quartet is a song cycle, a concert album performed semi-staged, a mash-up of "Snow White, Rose Red," The One Thousand and One Nights, the Noh play Matsukaze, "Cruel Sister", "The Fall of the House of Usher", the front page photo of a fatal train accident, and a grab bag of Twilight Zone episodes. The ghost of Thelonious Monk is sometimes invoked, but does not appear; whisky is often invoked, and, if you see the show live, will most certainly appear. "I'm confused/And more than a little frightened," says (one incarnation of) the (more-or-less) protagonist. "It's okay, my dear," her sister/lover/mother/daughter/deuteragonist reassures her, "this is a circular story."

Once upon a time two sisters fell in love with an astronomer who lived in a tree. He seduced Rose, the younger, then stole her work ("for a prestigious astronomy journal"), and then abandoned her for her sister, Pearl. Rose asked a bear to maul the astronomer in revenge, but the bear first demanded a pot of honey, a piece of stardust, a secret baptism, and a photograph of a ghost. (The music is a direct quote of the list of spell ingredients from Into the Woods.) Rose searches for all these ingredients through multiple lifetimes; and that's the plot.

Except it is much less comprehensible than that. The songs are nested in each other like Scheherazade's stories; you can follow from one song to the next, but retracing the connections in memory is impossible; this is less a narrative than a maze. Surreal timelines crash together in atonal cacophany; one moment Dave Malloy, or a nameless astronomer played by Dave Malloy, or Dave Malloy playing Dave Malloy is trying to solve epistemology and another moment the entire house of Usher, or all the actors, are telling you about their favorite whiskies. The climax is a subway accident we have glimpsed before, in aftermath, in full, circling around it, a trauma and a terror that cannot be faced directly; the crash is the fall of a house is the failure to act is the failure to look is the failure to look away.

There are two recordings available. Ghost Quartet, recorded in a studio, has cleaner audio, but Live at the McKitterick includes more of the interstitial scenes and feels more like the performance.

In Green-Wood Cemetery, there were three slightly raised stages separated by batches of folding chairs, one for Dave Malloy, one for Brent Arnold, and one for Gelsey Bell and Brittain Ashford, with a flat patch of grass in the center across which they sang to each other, and into which they sometimes moved; you could sit in the chairs, or on cushions in front of the first row, or with cheaper tickets you could sit in the grass on the very low hills above the staging area, among the monuments and gravestones, and, presumably, among more ghosts. The show started a little before sunset; I saw a hawk fly over, and I could hear birds singing along when the humans sang a capella. Green-Wood is in the middle of Brooklyn, so even after dark I couldn't see stars; but fireflies sparked everywhere.

Copied from

skygiants and

qian: a meme that involves book collections and clicking on checkboxes, two of my favorite things.

My Favorite Books (Non-Binding)

ETA: Oh, the profound awkwardness of books which had a huge impact on me but whose authors have since been exposed as abusers. I left them off the list.

ETA2: I forgot so many people
Maybe I really will do another list. Pretty sure I could manage another hundred even with no repeat authors.

ETA3: I am surprised so many people are putting down A Little Princess! It has always been my favorite, but I had the impression The Secret Garden was much more popular.

Another year, another complete failure to write up my reading. I'll try to do favorites later, but in the meantime, have some stats. AMA about the books, or let me know you think about the ones you've also read.

Stats

Books read: 105
TBR (beginning/end of year): 105/99 (-6%)
From TBR: 42 (40%)
Books by POC: 39 (37%)
Books by women: 92 (88%)
Books by T/NB authors: 2 (2%)
Translations: 11 (10%)
New-to-me authors: 28 by 16 authors (15.4%)
Rereads: 39 (37%)

Resolutions: I see that I never wrote up 2023 or resolutions for it. I did privately resolve to read at least one book per month by a Black author, which I did by the average number if not by the calendar month. I had also been hoping to make it my year of James Baldwin, which did not happen at all, but hey, that means I can make that my official book resolution for the year of his hundredth birthday. I am also resolving to read at least one book of nonnarrative nonfiction per month (e.g., history books okay, memoirs not).

Longest in TBR stack: John M. Ford, Heat of Fusion and Other Stories (2004), which I got when it came out. Many books purchased in the last century still languish unread on my shelves, so for 2025 my other book resolution will be to read paper books from my TBR.

Most books by a single author: If I count collaborations as half-points, then it's a tie between C.J. Cherryh and Diana Wynne Jones at 10 each (thank you,

kate_nepveu and

skygiants respectively). If I count collaborations as whole books, CJC edges out DWJ by one. I am not resolving to continue these rereads in 2025 because no resolution is necessary.

Books read

*=reread

John Crowley, Conway Miscellany (Two Talks on Writing, Two Chapters in a Family Chronicle, Sixties Diary, 79 Dreams)
Erin Langston, Forever Your Rogue
Erin Langston, A Day Until Forever
Jesmyn Ward, Let Us Descend
Kelly Link, The Book of Love
Nghi Vo, Mammoths at the Gate
Toni Morrison & Rokia Traore, Desdemona
Deborah Biancotti, Waking in Winter
Sherry Thomas, His at Night*
Nghi Vo, The Brides of High Hills
Rachel Neumeier, Marag
Tansy Rayner Roberts, Time of the Cat
MO Xiang Tong Xiu, The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation V4*
MO Xiang Tong Xiu, The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation V5*
Barbara Willard, The Lark and the Laurel
Barbara Willard, The Sprig of Broom
Barbara Willard, The Iron Lily
Barbara Willard, A Flight of Swans
Barbara Willard, Harrow and Harvest
Barbara Willard, The Keys of Mantlemass
Helen Oyeyemi, Parasol Against the Axe
Moses Ose Utomi, The Lies of the Ajungo
Moses Ose Utomi, The Truth of the Aleke
Tansy Rayner Roberts, Of Knives and Night-Blooms
John M. Ford, Heat of Fusion
Gillian Bradshaw, The Beacon at Alexandria*
Barbara Willard, The Eldest Son
ONO Fuyumi, Hill of Silver Ruins 2
ONO Fuyumi, Hill of Silver Ruins 3
ONO Fuyumi, Hill of Silver Ruins 4
Rosemary Sutcliff, Blue Remembered Hills
Sofia Samatar, The Practice, the Horizon, the Chain
Vanessa Len, Only a Monster*
Vanessa Len, Never a Hero
Gregory Feeley, Arabian Wine
Shelley Parker-Chan, He Who Drowned the World
Martha Wells, Network Effect*
Martha Wells, System Collapse
CJ Cherryh, Downbelow Station*
CJ Cherryh, Finity's End*
CJ Cherryh & Jane Fancher, Alliance Rising*
CJ Cherryh, Heavy Time*
CJ Cherryh, Hellburner*
CJ Cherryh, Rimrunners*
CJ Cherryh, Tripoint*
CJ Cherryh, Merchanter's Luck*
CJ Cherryh, 40,000 in Gehenna*
Karen Lord, The Blue, Beautiful World
Rebecca Fraimow, Lady Eve's Last Con
Karen Lord, Redemption in Indigo*
Rachel Neumeier, Rihasi
Tansy Rayner Roberts, Land Glorious
Tansy Rayner Roberts, This Enchanted Island
Karen Lord, Unraveling
Indra Das, The Last Dragoners of Bowbazar
Scarlett Peckham, The Earl I Ruined
Ananda Lima, Craft: Stories I Told the Devil
Alice Bell, Grave Expectations
Alice Bell, Displeasure Island
William Melvin Kelley, A Different Drummer
Sophia McDougall, Mars Evacuees*
Sophia McDougall, Space Hostages*
Ibtisam Azem, The Book of Disappearance
Alexandra Vasti, In Which Margo Halifax Earns Her Shocking Reputation
Zen Cho, The Friend Zone Experiment
Joan Vinge, Psion*
Sarah Rees Brennan, Long Live Evil
LaToya Jordan, To the Woman in the Pink Hat
Delia Marshall Turner, Nameless Magery
Sofia Samatar, Opacities
Delia Marshall Turner, Of Swords and Spells
Delia Marshall Turner, The Stick Princess
Margaret Kennedy, The Wild Swan
CJ Cherryh, Cuckoo's Egg*
MO Xiang Tong Xiu, Heaven Official's Blessing 4*
MO Xiang Tong Xiu, Heaven Official's Blessing 4*
MO Xiang Tong Xiu, Heaven Official's Blessing 6*
MO Xiang Tong Xiu, Heaven Official's Blessing 7*
MO Xiang Tong Xiu, Heaven Official's Blessing 8*
Laura Kinsale, Midsummer Moon*
Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message
CJ Cherryh & Jane Fancher, Alliance Unbound
Susanna Clarke, The Wood at Midwinter
Susanna Clarke, Piranesi
Kari Sperring, The Book of Gaheris
Nisi Shawl, The Day and Night Books of Mardou Fox
Diana Wynne Jones, Eight Days of Luke*
Tansy Rayner Roberts, Season of Dragons
Tansy Rayner Roberts, Siren Boots*
Diana Wynne Jones, Wilkins' Tooth*
Diana Wynne Jones, Power of Three*
Diana Wynne Jones, The Ogre Downstairs*
Diana Wynne Jones, Dogsbody*
Diana Wynne Jones, Cart & Cwidder*
Diana Wynne Jones, Drowned Ammet*
Diana Wynne Jones, The Spellcoats*
Diana Wynne Jones, The Crown of Dalemark*
Diana Wynne Jones, Charmed Life*
Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny
Ursula Whitcher, North Continent Ribbon
Charlotte Carter, Rhode Island Red
Tasha Suri, The Jasmine Throne*
Tasha Suri, The Oleander Sword*
Tasha Suri, The Lotus Empire
Iona Datt Sharma, Blood Sweat Glitter

Comics, graphic novels, and manga read

KIM Yeon-Joo, Nabi: The Prototype*
KIM Yeon-Joo, Nabi 1*
Tom King & Phil Hester, Gotham City: Year One
John Francis Moore & Stefano Gaudiano, Batman: Family
HINEKURE Wataru & Aruko, My Love Mix-Up! 1
HINEKURE Wataru & Aruko, My Love Mix-Up! 2
KAWAHARA Kazune, High School Debut 1*
KAWAHARA Kazune, High School Debut 2*

It is probably also safe to assume I read a bunch of ongoing series, particularly Kelly Thompson's new Bird of Prey series and DC/Batfamily comics featuring Tim Drake in some capacity, but I am terrible at tracking at individual issues.

Spoilers are falling

Sharon wanted a party, and found a fatal drink; Alice wanted the end of the family curse; Lilia wanted to find joy in her powers and not despair. All the witches who have found the objects of their quests have died, but this is the first episode where the character death really makes sense to me. Sharon was confused and misnamed; Alice was free for the first time in her life; they had more to do. But we get the whole of Lilia's life and the whole of her choices.

Even so, I am not sure this death, or the other deaths, are final. In Tarot, Death isn't death; it's transformation. And witches travel the Road hoping to be transformed.

I didn't realize it was a quake until it was almost over; I thought it was just an unusual amount of construction across the street, or some kind of problem with the elevated train half a block away. Steady rattle/shake, no big sudden shocks. My walls shook, but nothing fell, and there isn't any immediately obvious damage to the building on my floor. It was much less frightening than the 2011 quake, when I was on the 20-somethingth floor above the pit of the Penn Station and I could feel the building *sway*.

My sister, in a basement in NJ, felt nothing; have not heard from my father in Staten Island and assume he slept through it. So far I've heard reports of people noticing the quake as far north as Vermont and as far south as Delaware; no injuries reported yet, and very little verified property damage.

The emergency alert notification didn't hit my phone until 41 minutes after the quake.

I guess two quakes in 15 years means I really should bolt the bookcases to the wall, huh.

Review copy from Netgalley.

There was one cure for grief. You see the body; you mourn.

This is mostly a fairly straightforward retelling of the Christian Incarnation with Jesus as a transgender man, if by "straightforward" you mean almost anything but straight. I had been expecting, I suppose, something more like James Morrow's Only Begotten Daughter, which combines an agonizing Christ retelling with extreme satire; but there is no satire here, and no winking at the audience.

Maryam, knowing she is pregnant, maneuvers her aristocratic uncle into arranging her marriage to the political dissident Yosef, a sweet-natured and asexual radical; she is open about the nature of her pregnancy but unsurprised when her uncle concludes she is delusional or lying. (Ryman does not leave the reader in any doubt; the novel is clear throughout about the reality of divine intervention in this world. Though "intervention" is too mild a world: Miracles are deformations, not discrete changes but profound and disturbing reorganizations of the entire universe.)

Maryam and Yosef retreat to backwater Nazareth, where Maryam gives birth to a child she assumes is a daughter; the child, from the very beginning, has an adult or even supernatural awareness and understanding of the world. There is a lot about the internecine politics of Roman-occupied Judaea, but very scanty exposition; maybe it makes more sense to Christians, or maybe just to historians of the period.

Yosef preaches the equality of the sexes and the desirability of abstinence (the latter, honestly, is probably much more troubling by the tenets of traditional Judaism); when he and Maryam conceive more children later, it is through primitive artificial insemination rather than intercourse. Maryam, meanwhile, wants a daughter who will give women access to religious participation and all the power and glory that entails; she is infuriated to the point of abuse by the child's insistence that he is male, that he has taken the name of Yehushua after a dead friend, that he will be a carpenter instead of a scholar or preacher. Even once Yosef intervenes to save the child, Maryam struggles against Yehush and dehumanizes him; for decades she thinks of him as "it" rather than "he".

What reconciles them is time and a shared rejection of the earthly concerns of Nazareth social climbers. Maryam and Yehush are indeed alike: passionate, obdurate, and single-minded to the point of tunnel vision. God, Yehush eventually attempts to explain, needs to "learn about pain":

The Son whispered. “I can’t understand it all. But God does not have to do things in order. Here, my dying and its dying with me creates the sympathy. The forgiveness. The understanding that it is horrible to die. And what’s horrible about it is. Is that each time someone dies a part of the universe dies too. And so over time, whole peoples go – their songs, stories, wisdoms.”

“I must die. So that God lives through the death and so changes. And so God will let you all live in the spirit.”

Death is the impetus for change: the original Yehushua's death prompts Yehush to claim his new name and true gender; Yosef's death prompts Yehush to leave Nazareth and become a prophet; Yehush's death prompts God to create souls. It is perhaps inevitable that the book ends in the moment of a pieta, wrought however strange: not Yehush but God Itself seeking a mother's consolation.

Review copy from Netgalley.

I cried, and then stopped crying because otherwise I would never have stopped crying. Things come to an awful dead center that way. You will notice that even my diction is becoming feminine, thus revealing my true nature; I am not saying “Damn” any more, or “Blast”; I am putting in lots of qualifiers like “rather,” I am writing in these breathless little feminine tags, she threw herself down on the bed, I have no structure (she thought), my thoughts seep out shapelessly like menstrual fluid, it is all very female and deep and full of essences, it is very primitive and full of “and’s,” it is called “run-on sentences.”--Joanna Russ, The Female Man

This Library of America edition of Joanna Russ's work is welcome and frustratingly insufficient. Russ, one of the classic feminist writers who remade science fiction in the 70s, is characterized by wit, sharpness, humor, impatience, and rage; the rage is what very many of her offended interlocutors focused on, which is ironic, given the amount of violence in their own novels. Equally notable, however, are the stylistic experimentation, metafictional (and metaphysical) disruptions, and pyrotechnic prose.

Feminism is the organizing logic of her work: an explicitly Marxist feminism with a cutting analysis of capital and power. How to Suppress Women's Writing (1983), her scathing critique of the rhetorical methods of patriarchal erasure of women writers, is greatly indebted to Tillie Olsen's Silences (1978), which investigated the effects of class and hidden domestic labor on the output of women writers; her fiction depicts financial and emotional dependence as intertwined. Despite this, much of her work shows the same limitations as much other ground-breaking second-wave feminist work: a lack of, or only limited awareness of, intersectionality, particularly regarding race and gender identity.

Nicole Ruddick selects four novels and a handful of short stories. She opens with Russ' most famous work. The Female Man (1975) depicts the meeting four versions of one woman (or one woman in four modes): Janet, from a utopian all-female future; Jeannette, closeted and cringing, in a world where the Depression never ended and various social revolutions never took place; Joanna, who is not quite Joanna Russ, maybe, or maybe (actually) these characters are all projections of Joanna-in-the-book, as they are projections of Joanna-outside-the-book, mise en abyme as trompe l'oeil; and the secret fourth you only discover later. Also included: "When It Changed", the elegaic short story that first introduced the all-female world of Whileaway.

Next is perhaps Russ' single greatest work, We Who Are About To … (1977); a memento mori, a working out of the cold equations of a shipwreck on an alien world; a reproach to the triumphalist logic of Robinsonades in general and, I suspect, to Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover Landfall (1972) in particular.

This is followed by On Strike Against God (1980), which is what nowadays we call autofiction: associate professor of English Esther falls in love with graduate student Jean and struggles with the sexism of her department; it is The Female Man in a lighter and less speculative mode, sharing the political awakening, the affair with a younger woman, the mundane outrages (the mundane microaggressions) of acquaintances at parties. (On Strike Against God, Ruddick tells us, was originally drafted in 1974, a year before The Female Man was published; but The Female Man had been on submission since 1971, only finally accepted by sf editor Frederik Pohl after numerous rejections by literary publishers.)

The Complete Alyx Stories (compilation 1983; orig 1967-1974) are the playful, furious adventures of a female rogue, explicitly indebted to Fritz Leiber; the deliberately muddy fantasy ahistoricism of the first few stories becomes historical Tyre by the time of the science fiction novel Picnic on Paradise, with a corresponding darkening in tone. It is a joy to see all of the Alyx stories in one place (previous versions of The Adventures of Alyx skipped "A Game of Vlet"), even in the wrong order.*

The final work is the Hugo Award-winning novella, "Souls" (1984), long out-of-print, the story of a medieval Abbess confronting Norse invaders; its desperation for escape and its intense humanism remind me of Tiptree, though recast into a deliberate if hard-won hopefulness.

So what's the frustrating part?

The four novels and one of short stories were already widely available, in print from the Wesleyan University Press and in ebook from Open Road Media. Excluded, much harder to get hold of, and equally excellent are the majority of Russ' short fiction and any of her extensive sf criticism, both among the best the field has to offer. This particular set of works could serve as a good introduction to Russ for new audiences, except for the scarce footnotes and the lack of introductory context. There's an extensive biographical timeline for Russ, with helpful notes about date of composition versus date of publication, and few notes about literary references, but nothing to explain the changed cultural contexts and expectations. When I first read The Female Man at sixteen, it was a revelation. To today's sixteen year olds -- well, I think it could be; but it will also be a puzzle. I am not sure how legible all of Russ' fiction is to a contemporary audience forty years out, despite its tragic continuing relevance.

Do I think you should read Russ anyway, if you haven't before? Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.

--
* I will die on this hill: the reading order for the Alyx stories should be:

"Bluestocking"
"I Thought She Was Afeared Until She Stroked My Beard"
"A Game of Vlet"
"The Barbarian"
Picnic on Paradise
"The Second Inquisition"

This keeps the key change of the final line of "The Second Inquisition", and makes "The Barbarian" the transition from the fantasy of the earlier stories to the science fiction of the final two.

I owe so many comment responses! But I interrupt my belated book talk with ... more book talk. Book sales talk, though! Time-sensitive.

For fans of relatively obscure 80s and 90s sf & fantasy, i.e., my people: there are now ebook versions of Laurie J. Marks' The Watcher's Mask and Dancing Jack and Rosemary Edghill's Hellflower series (formerly published as by eluki bes shahar). I have an old (so old) write-up of Marks' novels here, and will just steal its description of Dancing Jack:

I am pretty sure this is the world's only imaginary-world fantasy about the love affair between a lesbian steamboat pilot and a failed revolutionary turned farmer. Also involved in the plot are the desperate queen of a dying nation, a disgraced nobleman, a toymaker whose wind-up puppets seem to inspire slow transformations in their owners, and a half-dead city living in the unusually realistic aftermath of a plague. This may be my favorite of Marks' novels, because hey! Steamboats! (And it makes a surprisingly satisfactory paired reading with Caroline Stevermer's River Rats.)

The level of technology is unusual for fantasy, and so is the focus on middle-aged protagonists--all three of the women who end up going on the not-quite-typical quest for the renewal of land are old enough to have grown children, and have lived through more than enough trials, tribulations, and crises ordinary and extraordinary already. The magic [...] has shifted from the rule-bound almost scientific magic of [Marks'] first three books to something much closer to magic realism, where transformations and changes are worked by wishes and unacknowledged desires.

The ebook has a gorgeous new cover by Kathleen Jennings (artist notes here), as opposed to the previous horrific clown.

The Edghill/shahar trilogy is a fun space opera with some playful takes on futuristic language that either delight or annoy me depending on mood.

US only: Humble Bundle for Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, with various price levels.

The bundle levels group the books roughly in chronological order, and therefore I must earnestly beg you NOT to bother with the 3 books for a buck bundle. Please! All it gets you is the two worst books in the series and one that I am incredibly fond of but still doesn't have the characterization down quite yet.

You do not need to read this series in order! You should not read this series in order! I tell you this as someone who did read like first 9 or 10 in order as they came out in the US, because I was young and would read sf and fantasy if you put it in front of me. The series doesn't really start feeling like Discworld until Book 4 (entirely new cast and plotline) and you don't get the first legit Great Discworld Novel till Book 5 (one carryover character, entirely new plot).

(Other people will tell you the first Great Discworld Novel is Guards! Guards! (Book 7), but they are fools who do not appreciate 20 pounds of Shakespeare in a 1-pound sack.)

Discworld is a series in the loose sense of being a set of stand-alone books which share a common setting and sometimes overlapping sets of characters. There are a number of subseries focused on particular locations and characters, which are nice to read in order of internal subseries chronology, because the characters (and especially their relationships) do develop over time -- but even in these, honestly, each book stands alone and you can read them in any order. For what it's worth, my favorites are the City Watch and Witches books, and my least favorite are the Unseen University books, but even the City Watch series has a couple of duds and I am deeply fond of two of the Unseen University books ...

Look, just don't start with The Colour of Magic or The Light Fantastic and you'll be fine.

Finally, random physical books deeply discounted at Amazon US:
- Winsor McCay's The Complete Little Nemo at 55% off -- Little Nemo in Slumberland is a very strange, surreal, dreamy newspaper comic strip from the early 20th century, which I first discovered by way of John Crowley's Little, Big; I think these were probably influential in an underground way on an immense amount of weird early fantasy.
- Judith Merril's Homecalling: The Complete Solo Short SF at 53% off (48% off + 5% off coupon -- okay, thanks, Algorithm, if that's how you want to play, I guess?) - Hugely important mid-to-late-20th century sf writer, editor, and anthologist; her short fiction, mostly published from the late 40s through the early 60s, focused on women and the domestic impacts of scientific and technological changes in a way that was unusual at the time. If you know any of the stories, it's probably "That Only a Mother", a story about the social and psychological changes caused by limited nuclear war, which has been reprinted a zillion times.

2022 was probably my best reading year in a while, both in terms of volume read and the intensity of delight in new favorites discovered. Is correlation causation, or are both byproducts of other emotional undercurrents? Eh.

It was also a great year for sf TV (Andor, Interview with the Vampire, Severance, in no particular order).

AMA about the books (or TV!), or just let me know what you thought about them.

Favorites

Toni Anzetti, Typhon's Children (1999) and Leviathan's Wake (2001)
Louise Erdrich, The Red Convertible (2009)
Sarvat Hasin, The Giant Dark (2021)
KIM Bo-Young, I'm Waiting for You and Other Stories (trans. 2021 by Stephanie Bowman & Sung Ryu)
Tamsyn Muir, The Locked Tomb series (2019-2022)
Olga Ravn, The Employees (2018; trans. 2020 by Martin Aitken)
Matthew Salesses, Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping (2021)
Sofia Samatar, The White Mosque (2022)
Cordwainer Smith, The Rediscovery of Man (coll. 1993)
Tasha Suri, The Oleander Sword (2022)
Sheree Renée Thomas, Nine Bar Blues (2020)
Lavie Tidhar, Central Station (2016)
E.H. Young, Miss Mole (1930)

Honorable mentions

Joan Aiken, The Serial Garden (coll. 2008)
Frances Hardinge, Unraveller (2022)
Calvin Kasulke, Several People Are Typing (2022)
Vanessa Len, Only a Monster (2022)
Shelley Parker-Chan, She Who Became the Sun (2022)

Stats

Books read: 140
TBR (beginning/end of year): 84/70 (-17%)
From TBR: 60 (43%)
Books by POC: 59 (42%)
Books by women: 123 (88%)
Books by T/NB authors: 6 (4%)
Translations: 33 (24%)
New-to-me authors: 36
Rereads: 18 (13%)

Longest in TBR stack: Elizabeth Bowen, The Little Girls (>6/1/1995; penultimate unread college purchase. Also penultimate unread Elizabeth Bowen novel).

Also in the stack in the previous century: Christina Stead, The Salzburg Tales (9/1/1996), The Beauties and the Furies (6/1/1995-9/13/1997); Elizabeth Taylor, The Soul of Kindness (6/1/1995-9/13/1997); Cordwainer Smith, The Rediscovery of Man (10/22/1999); Kate Wilhelm, City of Cain (6/1/1995-9/13/1997); Joan Aiken, Return to Harken House (6/1/1995-9/13/1997).

There are a lot of books whose purchase date is 6/1/95-9/13/97 because I got them some time between graduating college and the day I decided to build a book database. (I needed to learn about databases for my job, so hey.) Actual specific dates anywhere in that era means either I bought them online or left a receipt in the book as a bookmark.

Books read

*=reread

Toni Anzetti, Typhon's Children
Premee Mohamed, The Annual Migration of Clouds
Sarvat Hasin, The Giant Dark
L.A. Hall, Unhistoric Acts: An Imperfect Social State (Clorinda Cathcart's Circle, #15)
Sandra McDonald, Diana Comet and Other Improbable Stories
Toni Anzetti, Riders of Leviathan
Matthew Salesses, Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping
KIM Bo-Young, I'm Waiting for You and Other Stories
Elizabeth Taylor, The Soul of Kindness
Joan Aiken, Last Movement
Joan Aiken, The Butterfly Picnic
Joan Aiken, Trouble with Product X
Sheree Renée Thomas, Nine Bar Blues
Catherine Cooke, The Winged Assassin (Winged Assassin, #1)
Sarvat Hasin, You Can't Go Home Again
UEHASHI Nahoko, The Beast Player (The Beast Player, #1-2)
UEHASHI Nahoko, The Beast Warrior (The Beast Player, #3-4)
Rachel Neumeier, Winter of Ice and Iron
Elizabeth Bowen, The Little Girls
Karen Lord, The Best of All Possible Worlds
Sarvat Hasin, This Wide Night
Rachel Neumeier, Keraunani (Tuyo, #4)
Karen Lord, The Galaxy Game
Sarah Tolmie, The Fourth Island
Rosemary Sutcliff, The Shield Ring
Sarah Rees Brennan, Striking Distance (Fence, #1)
Sarah Rees Brennan, Disarmed (Fence #2)
HYUUGA Natsu, The Apothecary Diaries: Volume 1 (The Apothecary Diaries, #1)
HYUUGA Natsu, The Apothecary Diaries: Volume 2 (The Apothecary Diaries, #2)
HYUUGA Natsu, The Apothecary Diaries: Volume 3
HYUUGA Natsu, The Apothecary Diaries: Volume 4
Katherine Sturtevant, Mistress Moderately Fair
Jude Morgan, Symphony
Shelley Smith, An Afternoon to Kill
Michelle D. Commander, Avidly Reads Passages
Premee Mohamed, A Broken Darkness
ROU Bao Bu Chi Rou, The Dumb Husky and His White Cat Shizun
Elizabeth Taylor, Mossy Trotter
Sarah Moss, Ghost Wall
Jude Morgan, The King's Touch
Shelley Parker-Chan, She Who Became the Sun
Kevin Young, Stones
Vanessa Len, Only a Monster
Isaac Fellman, Dead Collections
Calvin Kasulke, Several People Are Typing
MO Xiang Tong Xiu, Heaven Official's Blessing V2
Usman Malik, Midnight Doorways
Elie Mystal, Allow Me To Retort
L.A. HallRescue Operations: Changes of Life
Joan Aiken, The Serial Garden
Holly Wade Matter, Damned Pretty Things
Lavie Tidhar, Central Station
Xueting Christine Ni, Sinopticon 2021
Cordwainer Smith, The Rediscovery of Man
Olga Ravn, The Employees
MO Xiang Tong Xiu, Scum Villain's Self-Saving System 2
SORATANI Reina, I Swear I Won't Bother You Again! 1
Claudia Gray, The Murder of Mr. Wickham
HYUUGA Natsu, The Apothecary Diaries, Volume 5
Yu Chen & Regina Kanyu WangThe Way Spring Arrives
Patricia A. McKillip, The Riddle-Master of Hed*
Patricia A. McKillip, Heir of Sea and Fire*
Rachel Neumeier, Shines Now, and Heretofore
Patricia A. McKillip, Harpist in the Wind*
Patricia A. McKillip, Throme of the Erril of Sherill*
Barbara Hambly, Windrose Chronicles Short Stories
MO Xiang Tong Xiu, The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation Volume 2
Rachel Neumeier, Suelen
Louise Erdrich, The Red Convertible
Sarah Monette, The Grief of Stones
Sarah Monette, Witness for the Dead
Ritch Calvin, Queering SFF
Sarah Monette, The Goblin Emperor*
Alejo Carpentier, The Kingdom of This World
Bethany C. Morrow, Mem
Tess Sharpe, The Girls I've Been
Hernan Diaz, Trust
Tasha Suri, What Souls Are Made Of
Jeannette Ng, Under the Pendulum Sun
K-Ming Chang, Bone House
Antonia Forest, The Player's Boy
Tamsyn Muir, Gideon the Ninth
Tamsyn Muir, Harrow the Ninth
Elizabeth Hand, Wylding Hall
MO Xiang Tong Xiu, Scum Villain's Self-Saving System 3
Antonia Forest, The Players and the Rebels
Alaya Dawn Johnson, Trouble the Saints
Michael Ondaatje, Warlight
Kate Wilhelm, City of Cain
Tansy Rayner Roberts, Have Spirit, Will Duchess
Tamsyn Muir, Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower
NAKAMURA Satsuki, Though I Am An Inept Villainess 1
Kari Sperring, Rose Knot
Pamela Dean, The Secret Country*
Pamela Dean, The Hidden Land*
Pamela Dean, The Whim of the Dragon*
Pamela Dean, The Dubious Hills*
Diana Wynne Jones, The Game*
Diana Wynne Jones, The Homeward Bounders*
Tasha Suri, The Oleander Sword
E.H.Young, Miss Mole
Nghi Vo, When the Tigers Came Down the Mountain
Alexandra Rowland, A Taste of Iron and Gold
Tamsyn Muir, Nona the Ninth
AGITOGI Akumi, My Happy Marriage! Volume 1
Rose Lerner, Sailor's Delight
SAKI IchibuFormerly, the Fallen Daughter of a Duke
AMEKAWA Touko, 7th Time Loop 1
NAKAMURA Satsuki, Inept Villainess 2
Frances Hardinge, Unraveller
P.C. Hodgell, Deathless Gods
SORATANI Reina, I Swear I Won't Bother You Again! 2
AGITOGI Akumi, My Happy Marriage! Volume 2
HYUUGA Natsu, The Apothecary Diaries 6
Ursula K. Le Guin, Conversations on Writing
Martha Wells, City of Bones
Natasha Lance Rogoff, Muppets in Moscow
Sofia Samatar, The White Mosque
MO Xiang Tong Xiu, Grand Master of Demonic Cultivation 3
Michelle Cliff, Into the Interior
Aster Glenn Gray, A Garter as a Lesser Gift
Megan Whalen Turner, Moira's Pen
Everina Maxwell, Ocean's Echo
Tansy Rayner Roberts as Livia Day, Drop Dead in Red
MO Xiang Tong Xiu, Scum Villain's Self-Saving System
MO Xiang Tong Xiu, Heaven Official's Blessing V3
MO Xiang Tong Xiu, Heaven Official's Blessing V4
Christina Stead, The Salzburg Tales
AMEKAWA Touko, 7th Time Loop 2
Sarah McCarry, The Darling Killers
SAKI IchibuFormerly, the Fallen Daughter of a Duke 2
Christina Stead, The Beauties and Furies
Nghi Vo, Into the Riverlands
ROU Bao Bu Chi Rou, Remnants of Filth/Yu Wu
Diana Wynne Jones, Conrad's Fate*
Diana Wynne Jones, Dogsbody*
Isaac Fellman, The Two Doctors Gorski
Sarah Tolmie, All the Horses of Iceland
Joan Aiken, Return to Harken House
Joan Aiken, The Haunting of Lamb House*

coffee & ink

Books, tv, comics, music

Chess (Imperial Theater, New York City, 9/17/25)

C.J. Cherryh bibliography

The Very Slow C.J. Cherryh Reread

Ghost Quartet (Green-Wood Cemetery, 6/28/25)

(no subject)

Books read in 2024

Agatha All Along 1x07: "Death's hand in mine"

Earthquake report

HIM by Geoff Ryman (2023)

Joanna Russ: Novels and Stories, edited by Nicole Ruddick (2023)

PSA: Book sales

Books read in 2022

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